Forces of Evolution

On July 3^rd, 1863, after two days of horrendous fighting in the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, the Army of Northern Virginia began to form up behind a tree covered tract. Directly in front of it, on a gradual hill almost two miles away, lay the Army of the Potomac. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surveyed the battlefield. For two days, his rebel army had fought, bled, and died in an attempt to defeat the Union army, march on Washington and gain peace and independence for the Confederacy.

            Lee ordered General George Pickett to lead a grand charge across the open hillside and attack the dug in Union army at its center. A clump of trees sat at the Northern army line’s mile-wide center. “Aim for the copse of trees,” Pickett urged his officers as the 15,000 strong division began the long march forward.

            The troops marched as cannon fire and small bore canister shells tore gaping holes in their ranks. The men reformed and pressed forward moving in an orderly, disciplined march into a furious wall of fire. Barely half strength, they reached the front of the Union line. During furious hand to hand fighting a small number of rebel troops managed to breach the Union defenses and pour through at the copse of trees. For a few dramatic moments the battle hung in the balance with those few Confederate soldiers on the cusp of victory. But, a rapid Union counter-attack overwhelmed the rebel soldiers. In less than six hours the haggard Army of Northern Virginia retreated from the battlefield. They were badly beaten and would never again threaten an invasion of the north. Within two years, the Confederate States of America would cease to exist as an independent body. They foolishly marched into a withering fire and were slaughtered. For a few brief moments at the copse of trees they could sense victory. It was their high water mark. It would never return.

            I thought about that army as I watched the Presidential election returns with ninety other inmates, almost every one of whom had their TV turned on as the news broadcast the results. The vast majority of men in this place saw the re-election of President Obama as a wondrous event. They cannot separate race and economic status from a campaign. Obama, they believe, is just like them. They don’t understand that the President abhors gangs and crime, and that he is part of the “one percent.”

            For me, as I watched more states go “blue” I couldn’t help but think I was witnessing the high water mark of the GOP. Never again, I fear, will they muster sufficient national strength to win. It is ironic that so many in the current Republican Party reject evolution, because evolution explains their predicament. They either evolve or die off. I believe they will choose the latter.

            I spend a great deal of time each day explaining history, philosophy, politics, and economics to my fellow convicted felons. For many in here, I’m the most educated man they’ve ever met. And, as the election approached I found myself explaining the Republican’s positions on virtually every subject. Most of the time, however, I found myself serving as an apologist for the party of Lincoln, a party that has lost its identity and its way.

            Some reading this may wonder what an inmate, a convicted felon, is doing advising anyone. Good question. Perhaps, more than most, I know what it means to lose one’s way. Perhaps, more than most, I know you can change. But staying inert means ruin.

            Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote even as they took more than 59% of the white vote with sizeable majorities in those ages 35 to 64 and over 65. If the United States was all married, white, church-going families with children, Mitt Romney would be president. The problem the Republicans have is that’s not America in 2013.

            Thirteen percent of all voters were Black. Romney got 7% of those. Eleven percent of all voters were Hispanic (more in some of the crucial swing states). Romney lost that block 71% to 27%. Young voters (18 to 30) accounted for 19% of the votes tabulated. Romney lost them two to one. You will not win many elections where you start out conceding one of every three votes.

            Why doesn’t the party of Lincoln have more sway with minority voters? After all, both Black and Hispanic voters match white marital and church demographics so prized among the Republican establishment. Could it be because of the harsh rhetoric and outrageous social positions taken by Republicans smack of racism?

            I have learned a good deal during my incarceration. Here are a few basics. First, any rational parent, regardless of color, wants their children to have a better life than they do. Second, people come to America for opportunity. In spite of this nation’s faults, it is still looked at as the one place where dreams for a better life can come true. It’s what drove white Puritans here in the seventeenth century and what drives Mexicans, Columbians, Sudanese, Chinese, and people from a hundred other countries to come here.

            In many ways, I now accept that my time in prison has made me into a better man. I’ve become a born again Christian. I don’t say that lightly. I never believed in such a thing. Life, however, when it tears at your gut and you wonder, “Can I survive tonight?” brings you face to face with the Almighty. I was an ordained Deacon, Elder, and Sunday School teacher in my church. And from all appearances, I was a “good Christian.” But I wasn’t. It wasn’t until I sat alone in a cell and had nothing left that I turned to God. I evolved. Perhaps that’s the place the Republican Party now finds itself.

            A good deal will be written about this election. Fault will be assessed. “Romney was the wrong candidate” some will argue. Others will blame the Tea Party for their intolerance on issues such as gay rights, abortion, and birth control. But, like inmates coming to grips with their crimes and atoning for their wrong doing the Republicans must be open to change.

            Abraham Lincoln came to believe that the Civil War, the earth shattering bloodletting the nation underwent was divinely required to end the scourge of slavery. But Lincoln also saw the future. He knew those same battling people could eventually find “the better angels in ourselves.”

            You either evolve or you die. That is the crossroad the Grand Old Party stands before.

Frank and Sam and other Lawbreakers

I watched the news this week as two young American hikers were released from prison in Iran and flown “to freedom” to the Sultanate of Oman.  The Sultan, it seems, paid the Iranian authorities $1,000,000 to secure the early release of the two Americans, two years into eight year sentences for illegally crossing the border into Iran.  How ironic, I thought.  The “dark and sinister” Iran has a more progressive early release system than the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Those two hikers – who broke legitimate Iranian laws on border integrity (a favorite topic for the Tea Party crowd:  border security) were released after serving 25% of their sentence.  In Virginia, those two guys would still have five more years to go:  85% of an eight year sentence is 84 months (7 years).

“But those two young Americans are innocent”, you respond.  We’ll come back to that later.  Let me tell you about Frank and Sam.

Frank and Sam are two new students assigned to me in the adult basic ed class I tutor.  Frank was born in 1945.  He is a soft spoken 66 year old black man with a slight stammer.  He reads at the 2^nd grade level.  Sam is a 61 year old black man confined to a wheelchair.  He suffers from diabetes.  His left leg was amputated slightly above the knee from complications with the disease.  Where his leg was, he now ties his state-issued jeans in a knot.  He has sparkling bright eyes and an impish smile.  He reads at the 3^rd grade level.

The law in Virginia is that every “offender” at least be enrolled in adult basic ed with the goal of receiving a state-issued GED.  The law in Virginia is that “offenders” earn a maximum of 4.5 early release credit days for time served per month.  Offenders – in Virginia at least – must serve at a minimum 85% of their sentence.  As Charles Dickens so aptly put it, “the law my dear sir is a ass”. 

Frank and Sam will never earn their GEDs.  For the vast majority of their lives they have been treated as the refuse of a fast-paced economy that values technology but disrespects the integrity of simple labor.  Both men have meandered through life as unskilled laborers, barely making enough to support and sustain their families.

So every day these two guys, Frank and Sam, hauled bricks, cleaned toilets and picked up the trash from those of us fortunate enough to come from families with money.  And their kids?  They saw the same ads for all the “must haves”.  Only they couldn’t have.

So both men over their lives strayed from “the law”.  They broke into houses, sold “hot” property, and sold drugs.  They are part of the vast “criminal” underclass in this country:  men and women who were discarded by the public schools and society years ago, illiterate, forgotten, unable to provide for themselves and their families.

What does Virginia do?  The glorious Commonwealth returns them to prison in their sixties for “probation” violations at a cost, estimated by the Richmond Times Dispatch in an article on elderly inmates in December 2010, of $70,000 per year.  These men are lied to everyday.  “We’re going to retrain you and prepare you for a successful return to society.”  Excuse my language, but that dear readers is a load of shit.

These two older convicts are functionally illiterate men who have been ignored and treated unfairly their entire adult lives.  They have been run in and out of the “corrections” system for three and four year bids at a time. DOC is doing nothing to change their lives.  They will do their bids and return home to no money, no jobs, no nothing.

What good is prison doing Frank and Sam and the thousands and thousands of other inmates just languishing away in these corrections cesspools?

Which leads me back to our two “hero hikers” who accidentally crossed the Iranian border while hiking, “seeing the world”.  They violate Iran’s territorial integrity and are prosecuted under Iranian law.  We react with a great big “how dare you”.  Is Iranian law and trial procedures and sentencing somehow less worthy of support than American or Virginia law and criminal procedure?  And why is it we expect, no demand, Iran release these two “lawbreakers” while we applaud “lock em up and throw away the key” justice in America?

“But they’re innocent”, you remind me. 

Nine chief witnesses recanted in Troy Davis’s case and the State of Georgia still gave him the needle this week.  Perhaps we are no better than Iran.  Perhaps we’re nothing but hypocrites.  Explain the difference to Frank and Sam.

Conspiracies Everywhere

I was an unwilling participant to a conspiracy conversation the other day which got me thinking about failures in the nations corrections philosophy that are so prevalent today.  A couple of the young black college guys were debating the “real causes” of 9/11.  All three of these guys had read a revisionist “historians” (the guys not really a historian) take that the CIA and White House led the attack.  When I challenged their “research” they claimed I was too gullible.  “America’s the shit Larry.  Don’t you know that after what you’ve been through?”

Ignorance is alive and well in the inmate population.  Guys will buy any conspiracy theory – join bizarre prison created “religions” with off the wall theories.  I used to find it mildly entertaining.  But, like the rapid rise of another group of conspiracy believers – the Tea Party crew – I’m feeling a great deal of unease.  Prison spurs kooky views.  It’s up to the corrections professionals to address it.

When I was still held at the Henrico Jail I met an early twenties white kid who was an amazing artist.  He could draw anything – portraits, scenery, cars, you name it.  He was also covered in Nazi tattoos.  One morning around 5:00 as was my custom, I was drinking coffee, writing in my journal.  The kid sat down with me with a pained expression on his face.

“Mr. Larry, you’re a nice man.  I’m afraid the darks are gonna hurt you when you get to prison.  You need to join the Aryans.”

I thanked him for worrying about me but politely told him I didn’t need a white supremist group to keep me safe in prison.

Then I get to prison and I run up on Aryans, Hispanic gangs, a half dozen black gangs, Nation of Islam, Five Percenters, and a host of other fringe groups who each espouse a philosophy built on a corrupt power elite beating down on them.

Ask the average inmate to consider the real cost (in dollars) to taxpayers to keep them locked up and they will tell you prisons make money.  Why do they believe that when the evidence overwhelmingly shows the financial drain corrections has become? “If you were right Larry it’d make no sense to keep us locked up without early release.  Only a fool would run a system like that?” (Are you listening Governor McDonnell?).

Black inmates are suspicious of white inmates.  Two groups:  NOI and Five Percenters (anti-white) are recruiting members in droves.  Why?  Because they offer simplistic explanations for the despair that permeates the lives of inmates.  It is easier to accept your station in life believing “white America is a racist country bent on destroying blacks through prisons and drugs” (and one need only look at the extraordinarily high percentage of blacks incarcerated to see why this gains traction) than to engage in an in-depth study of this country’s racial schizophrenia.

As I tutor guys in History, English, Philosophy and the Social Sciences I am constantly surprised how little these guys know.  They have very little knowledge of history and are unable to synthesize events as they develop across historical/sociological lines.  Every event can be boiled down to some knee-jerk neo-Marxian theory of power and suppression of people.

So, what I do is, when asked, I state the truth.  I let the facts speak.  Does it change some things?  Sometimes.  Guys hunger to know why.  Prison should be a place of honest reflection.  Instead, it is a jungle of lies, anger and ignorance.  And the system feeds those three.  Courts aren’t “blind” arbiters of justice; sentences are disparate, even when crimes are similar; race and money matter in too many convictions and sentences.  Prisons become dumping grounds with too few programs, too little educational opportunities and sadistic guards and inmates vying for supremacy.

Men lose hope and without hope there is nothing.  In one of the most moving scenes in “The Shawshank Redemption”, Andy, sorting records in the warden’s office, barricades himself inside and takes over the prison speakers.  He puts on an operatic aria and the prison suddenly stills as the men listen to two women sing in Italian.  He is caught and goes to the hole.

The next scene, he is in chow – thirty days later with his friends.  They sit and stare in amazement at Andy looking fresh after such a long period in the hole.  “How’d you do it?” they asked.

“I listened to Mozart the whole time.” 

“You had music back there?”

Andy pauses, “In my mind.  They can physically keep me here, but in my mind I’m free.  I still have hope.”

There’s a reason hope lives even in a place as dehumanizing as prison.  Hope is about truth, and beauty, and love.  Too many men in prison have given up on hope.  They look for simple explanations; they see nothing but time.  Until prisons become places of hope, conspiracy theories will thrive; anger, despair and hatred will have homes; and fringe groups will flourish.

Hopefully, it will change.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

I watched with mixed emotions as the country went through the seizures of defaulting on the national debt.  Part of me was deeply amused.  Every cable news outlet had their “breaking news” and a countdown clock to debt Armageddon.  Both parties – and the president as well – played simple, false sound bites.  The “Tea Party” pushed demagoguery to a new limit.  Ah America, “God shed His grace on thee.”  And Virginia’s Governor?  He did more creative bookkeeping than I did to land myself in prison.

Governor McDonnell touted a $500 million surplus, except, he forgot to tell people he failed to meet the payment requirements to the Virginia Retirement System.  There is no surplus.  VRS is almost $17 billion underfunded and the Commonwealth still has an IOU outstanding to VRS for the prior year’s budget debacle.  And McDonnell has the brass set to go on CNN as a “possible VP” nominee and tout Virginia’s economic well-being.

A pox on both their houses!  As “The Economist” noted in an OpEd piece on March 19, 2011: 

“…despite all the rhetoric from the tea partiers, big government is not just the fault of the self-interested bureaucrats and leftist politicians.  Conservative voters…have kept on demanding the state do more…the right has built prisons, announced wars on drugs and terror, and indulged generals, farmers, and policemen…”

What we have seen in the recent economic unraveling is that everything costs.  And the bill for America’s love affair with “tough on crime” mass incarceration policy has come due.  Governor McDonnell can lead or he can step aside.  But, the time for change is now.

As states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Kentucky have realized, there are more effective and less expensive ways to handle most non-violent offenders.  These states are employing alternatives to sending someone convicted of a crime to prison.  They utilize home incarceration and day center reporting versus prison.

This isn’t a “bleeding heart liberal” approach.  Conservatives such as former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, drug czar William Bennett, Newt Gingrich and anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist are pushing for prison reform.

Where is Virginia in this discussion?  Not even involved.  Virginia will spend $25,000 to keep me housed in a low level facility this year and the costs continue to climb.  I am unable to pay restitution for my embezzlement while in here; I do not pay taxes; I do not help raise my youngest son.  Three years I’ve spent behind bars.  If Bob McDonnell was really the politician he claims to be, he’d look at my situation and the thousands like it.  He’d let us “do our time” outside the walls; working, making restitution, being productive citizens.

As the "Sentencing Project" reported recently, lawmakers in Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey and New York adopted significant policy changes to reduce prison populations.

“In each of these state a range of policy changes were adopted, including sentencing reforms, alternatives for ‘prison-bound’ people, reducing time served in prison, addressing parole release rates and reducing revocations”

23 states have made significant changes in the way sentences are handed out and the length of time an inmate serves – Virginia is not one of those 23.

Bob McDonnell and the Virginia General Assembly can make a difference.  $1 billion a year to house 40,000 inmates is enough reason to try.  They need to enact a real “earned good time credit” system that aggressively rewards inmates who seek to change and improve.  Early release should not just be a goal, but the mission of corrections.

Virginia can no longer afford to do nothing.  Virginia needs real solutions, not “creative” accounting.  The economic realities that showed their true colors this summer prove that government must make smart choices.  No longer can the U.S. with 5 percent of the world’s population, keep 25 percent of the world’s inmates behind bars.

Perhaps Governor McDonnell will finally get it.